Waiting for Christopher (15 page)

Feena froze. She buried her head in her book, waiting for the woman to walk past her and go inside. But instead, she sighed loudly and sat down beside Feena. She was wearing jeans, just as she had at Ryder’s. There were dark bands around the armholes of her sleeveless shirt, and Feena smelled a not unpleasant mix of sweat and talc. “Jesus,” the woman said, shaking her head and addressing no one in particular. “Sweet mother of Jesus, it sure is hot out here.”

Feena pulled the book nearer, turned her head away. What if Christy’s mother recognized her? What if she remembered her from Ryder’s or the playground? She tried to focus on the paragraph in front of her, but the words ran together, seemed as meaningless as if they’d been written in another language.

The woman shifted sideways onto one broad hip and retrieved a pack of cigarettes from the pocket of her jeans. “What you reading?”

Feena coughed as the woman lit up. How had she gotten herself in this bind? Why hadn’t she listened to Raylene? Why hadn’t she run the minute Christopher’s mother opened the door? “Just a book for English.” She waved the paperback under the woman’s nose, stood up, and looked toward the laundromat door.

“That’s good,” the woman told her. She ran a plump, lineless hand across her hair, no longer contained by the dolphin-shaped barrette that hung like an earring on one side of her head. She seemed unaware of the impression she must be making, the red face, the eyes swollen with crying. “I never finished school. Wish I did every single day that passes. You know?”

Feena nodded, then made an awkward break for the inside of the laundromat. “Yeah,” she said, on the run. “Sorry, I have to get my stuff.” She ducked through the door and stopped at the first dryer she found full. Foolishly, desperately, she opened it and began unloading some stranger’s clothes, piling underwear and shirts on the top of the still-warm machine.

To her horror, Christopher’s mother followed her inside, stood by the machine, talking and smoking, as if they were friends. “You live around here?” she asked in a voice that was much softer than the one Feena remembered from Ryder’s.

It was impossibly hot and humid inside, with a dozen thrumming machines backed against windowless walls. Feena tensed, waiting for some sign of recognition, but clearly, the woman didn’t remember her. Stuck in her role, Feena folded a man’s undershirt, then began bunching socks in pairs.

“No,” she said, trying not to look in the woman’s eyes, keeping her face averted, down, away. “I’m just visiting.” At least, she thought, grabbing for another sock, someone would be happy to find their laundry sorted. She only hoped they didn’t come back to claim it right now.

“Must be nice,” the woman observed. “Not living in this dump.” She handed Feena the mate to a faded pink sock she’d picked up. “If I’d finished school,” she continued, “I could get outa here. Get a job somewhere. You know?”

Feena wished the woman wouldn’t keep saying “You know?” Feena didn’t know, and she didn’t want to.

“My daddy used to tell me I was too thick to slice. Told me that right up till he got sick and needed me to dress him and feed him and wipe his ass.” She watched Feena folding, folding. “Guess I was smart enough to do that, huh?”

Feena searched the room wildly, spotted an empty laundry basket on an oilcloth-covered table in the back.

“Before he got sick, Daddy used to spend his time knockin’ sense into me and my sister.” She sucked on her cigarette as if she were breathing air, slow and deep. “You know?”

Feena dashed for the basket, piled the clothes in.

“Yeah. He sure used to like slamming us around.” The woman’s voice didn’t sound angry or even particularly excited. She could have been describing a wrestling match on TV. “Where you going?”

Feena was already at the door. She held the basket against her chest, and backed out into the sunlight. “Got to get this back,” she explained, turning afterward, racing down the first path she came to, then out of the park.

She was blocks away before she felt the weight of the basket, realized she’d run off with someone’s wardrobe. Next to what she’d already taken, that seemed a small offense. And she couldn’t return the clothes now, not with Christopher’s mother hiding out in the laundromat.

As she neared the boat, she slowed her pace. She had nearly five hours until she’d be able to slip into the cabin, drop her backpack on the table, and complain to Raylene about how lame math had been or how the cafeteria still figured Spanish rice was one of the four food groups.

She stashed the laundry basket behind a hedge of fat-faced clematis that bordered the clearing where she had phoned her mother that first night on the boat. Then, resurrecting an old habit, she headed home. It had been years since she’d come to her mother with a “boo-boo,” but suddenly, even though there was no visible wound, no place you could plaster a Flintstones Band-Aid, Feena needed Lenore.

I
t was Friday and sometimes, Feena remembered, her mother came home for lunch when her wallet was empty and her credit card was maxed. “The trouble with paychecks,” Lenore always complained, “is they don’t come twice a week.”

It wasn’t that Feena planned to tell her mother about Christy. Not exactly. But without the baby and the TV, it would be just the two of them.
That’s my big girl
. The hairbrush stroking, stroking.
That’s my big, good girl
.

But when Feena opened the door, the Pizza Hut was empty. It surprised her how disappointed she felt, how lost. She considered making herself something, but the heat that had built up, like a heavy animal waiting in the small rooms and leaping out at her as soon as she walked in, changed her mind. She settled for grabbing a can of soda from the refrigerator and the last stale doughnut from a box on the counter. She locked the front door behind her, then headed back for the boat.

Peter Milakowski, standing by the tugboat ride, waved at her as she hurried past. “Hey,” he called, almost cheerfully. “You be careful they don’t put you in jail.”

Feena froze.
What did the old man know?
She walked to the park gate, and he waved again.
What could he possibly know?

Now the wave turned into a summons. “So, come,” he said. “You could hide here.”

She stuffed the doughnut into her backpack and sauntered with as much indifference as she could to where he stood. “Why should I hide, Mr. Milakowski?”

“You don’t study, they come to get you, right?” He turned and peered into the metal pool where the tugs rested, unmoving. “School, it makes you sick?”

Feena felt herself go slack with relief. She stood beside him for a second, staring into the filmy water. “No,” she said. “I have a free period, that’s all.”

They turned, almost in unison, and leaned their backs against the tub. The amusement park was suffering its lunchtime slump; there wasn’t a single mother or toddler in sight. The two other rides were going through the motions, anyway, as if they carried baby ghosts. Around and around.

After a while, Mr. Milakowski roused himself. “Hmmm,” he said. He reached his elegant, gnarled fingers into the tool belt he wore around his waist and retrieved a small bottle. He held the bottle over the water, emptying a few drops beside the nearest boat. “School makes me sick a lot of times also.” He slapped at something, maybe a mosquito that couldn’t tell time, then found his mental place again. “Only thing I like of school is Miss Marna.”

“Your teacher?” Feena watched the water by the little tug turn a furious blue.

Mr. Milakowski nodded. “Miss Marna was for me an angel.”

He flipped a switch that set the boats in motion and stirred the water to a gentle cerulean. “But she has no time for good boys, see? She is watching always bad ones. This,” he added, talking above the noise of the motor that drove the boats, “is why Peter Milakowski becomes the worst student in the whole school.”

They moved to the bench alongside the ride, a bench from which mothers could wave and call out as their sons and daughters sailed by. Mothers could do this, of course, only if the ride was working, and only if there were any children there to ride it.

“I am sure she likes the other boys better, see?” Mr. Milakowski pocketed the bottle, then crossed his skinny legs, resigned to this lull, to the empty park. “She makes them to sit by her. Right up front where they can see her angel’s face.

“But not me. Never me.” He looked at Feena now, and she tried to resurrect a little boy from the elderly man in stained khakis. “Those other boys,” he said, “they always talk out. They make wrong answers.

“So I decide to help her notice Peter Milakowski. I start talking and I don’t stop. And every answer I give is wrong.” He smiled at the sixty-year-old memory as the tugs circled behind him. “I bite my tongue to keep the right ones down.”

Feena was smiling, too. “Then what happened?”

“Miss Marna, she gives me a long, sad look. She says I am hopeless, the worst boy she ever knows. Then she asks I hold out my hands to get hit with her ruler. There are tears in her eyes when she counts ten hits.” His face grew animated, warm with conviction. “And I move up.”

“Up?”

“After, she sits me in the front row, right next to her desk. I sit there for all year long.”

“And she really cried when she hit you?”

“Hmmmm,” he said again. “When Miss Marna stops and I see tears in her eyes the color of wren’s eggs, you know what I want?”

Feena shook her head.

“I want to move back to the last row. It hurts less than watching her cry.”

It wasn’t so hard, really, Feena decided now, to think of Mr. Milakowski as a boy.

But there was no comparison, she was sure. The sainted Miss Marna, who hit children in another time, another place, who cried when she wielded her ruler, who was worthy of a small boy’s devotion. She couldn’t have been anything like the red-faced woman Feena had just left standing by the dryers in the trailer park laundromat.

Still, even after she’d said goodbye to the old man and was headed back to the boat, she remembered the dangling barrette, the subdued, frightened voice. Yes, it was true. There
had
been tears in the woman’s eyes. But what did that prove? There was that cigarette, too. The one she’d seemed grafted to, the one she’d used when she… Those tears didn’t make Christy’s mother an angel, Feena decided. They just made her someone who’d gotten as good as she gave. Didn’t they?

When she reached the clearing, she remembered the laundry basket she’d hidden there. She told herself she was only going to return it, that was all. But once she’d gone back to Bide A Bit and dropped off the basket, she couldn’t leave. There was yelling in the trailer again.

She knew better than to sit out front now, so she stole around to the side street, where there was no chance she’d be seen.

This time, she could see them both through a window. Or rather, she could see their outlines through the half-closed blinds. What she noticed first was how the man (was he Christy’s father?) towered over the woman. She had seemed robust and chunky next to her son, but she looked helpless beside the giant who held her arm while he yelled, virtually in her face.

After a while, he dragged her closer to the window. Feena ducked around the corner, then sneaked back in the middle of his tirade. “Three months,” he screamed. “I been paying for this piece of junk for three lousy months.” As he yelled, he pounded on something in front of them, just out of sight below the window frame. “And that ain’t all, is it?” He yanked the woman’s arm up and down as if it were a slot machine lever and he would hit the jackpot if he pulled hard enough. “Is it?”

The woman answered, but Feena couldn’t hear what she said. Then the man let her go and lumbered to the other side of the room, coming back with a brightly colored box in his hand. “Goddamn computer game, for crying out loud. The kid ain’t even three.” He hurled the box toward the woman, who first tried to catch it, then settled for dodging as it sailed past her head.

“And this. What in hell you buy a treadmill for?” He kicked at something else outside the window frame. “You ain’t lost a pound in six years.” He grabbed her again. “Fat bitch.” He raised one trunklike arm and brought it down, pushing the woman into a wall. She collapsed like a plush doll, throwing her hands in front of her face, the same way Feena had seen Christy do. “Stupid, fat bitch. You gonna buy us right into the street, that’s what.”

He left her there and returned to pound whatever it was under the windowsill. “Right into the frigging street,” he repeated, slamming down with a huge, balled fist, hitting it again and again. “Stupid whore.”
Slam
. “Spending money I don’t got.”
Slam
. “Can’t take care of your own kid.”
Slam
. “Think you can waltz out”—
slam
—“and spend every lousy cent”—
slam
—“I goddamn make.”
Slam
.

He stopped hammering, stepped backward when his last blow triggered a thin, mechanical sound—an ironic, bouncy Joplin tune that filled the room and spilled out the window. That was when Feena finally understood Christy’s fascination with
Mama’s Music
. And that was the moment, as the player piano spouted its canned repertoire, that his mother made her escape.